Burroughs, Cutups, Mashups, and so forth

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Burroughs, Cut-ups, Mash-ups, and so forth

• LCC 2700 Intro to Computational Media
• Fall 2005
• Ian Bogost

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William S. Burroughs

• Adding machine industry heir lived off trust
  fundsAssociated with the Beat Generation and
  other countercultures His novel Naked Lunch
  led to changes in obscenity laws

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Dada

• An avant garde arts movement of the early 20th c
• Disgust with the war (WW1) and its cultural
  preconditions
• Public gatherings, demonstrations,
  art/politics/culture
• Tristan Tzara, one of the foundational figures in
  Dada (an arts movement of the early 20th c.)
• Created a poem by pulling words out of a hat

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Cut-ups

• Cut-ups a text is cut-up at random and
  rearranged to create a new one
• 1950s, Byron Gysin developed a more detailed
  version sliced layers of a newspaper (with pages
  below offering interesting juxtaposition)
• Gysin introduced Burroughs to the technique
• The writers version of the collage, or the
  motion/still camera (the accidents of photography)

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The Value of Cut-Ups

• Populist Cut-Ups are for everyone
• Experimental
• Gives new meaning to old works

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All Writing is Cut-Ups

• A collage of words read and overheard
• Proto cut-ups T.S. Eliots The Waste Land
• Burroughss explicit tie to von Neumann game
  theory and strategy as cut-up

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Remix

• Rearrange the musical experience through audio
  editing
• As early as 1970s (David Bowie)
• Sample-based genres hip-hop, electronic
• DJs as authors

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Mashup

• Combining the parts of more than one source
  (song)
• Bootlegs, Bastard Pop, Blends, etc.
• Web mashups using open APIs like Google or
  Amazon to create new applications
• Information separate from presentation
• Focus on existing code, not new code
• Examples
• http//www.aytozon.com/
• http//www.housingmaps.com/

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Procedurality and Cut-ups

• A focus on the rules of interaction
• Procedurality, not randomness or recombinance
  (often another name for randomness)
• For human or computer authors

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A computer author (conceptual blending)
her tale began when she was infected with
smugnessloveitis. she began her days looking in
the mirror at her own itchy entitled face. her
failure was ignoring her tormented angel nature.
life was an astounding miracle. nordic-beauty
death-figure vapor steamed from her pores when
she rode her bicycle. that was nothing
lovely. when 21 she was a homely woman. she
decided to persevere in the rain, she fears only
epidermis imperialists. she believes that evil
pride devours and alternates with pride of
hope. it was no laughing matter. she snuggles in
angel skin sheets and sleeps. inside she was
resolved to never find a smug or paranoid love.
D. Fox Harrell
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But is it readable?
This poem is a commentary on racial politics and
the lim- itations of simplistic binary views of
social identity. The dynamic nature of social
identity is also reflected in the way the program
produces different poems with different novel
metaphors each time it is run (though reading a
large num- ber of these could be tiresome).
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A human author
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A human author
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A human author
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Operationalizing cultural rules

• What behaviors are at work? How do they interact?
• What cultural structures and conditions underlie
  these behaviors?
• When we cut them up, how should we recombine
  them, and why?